Some people just want to see the whole world burn. And some cyberwarfare units just want your systems to go pufff.
Wipers are the cyber version of napalm, taking destruction from the kinetic to the cyberspace, and have been the most utilized weapons by cyberwars in the last decade. These wipers are design to destroy everything that they can get their hands on to: files, disks, backups, you name it. And they are purposefully designed this way by a dedicated group with their destabilizing a whole country in times of war.
In this talk we are going to go through the history of wipers, since our discovery of Flame in 2012 to our latest research on a destructive wiper we named Lotus Wiper. We are going to go through the technical details as well as providing a panoramic view to the impact that these types of cyberweapons have on countries, companies and people around the globe.
Presented at Malware Village — DEF CON 2026